BASHing Through Scripts

Today, Ken's back to bring you the next portion of his 'Nix series - creating scripts for command-line commands that help automate commands. Those of you who have used Apple's "Automator" software or have used batch-editors built into Adobe Photoshop CS will be familiar with just how extensible this can be - and it just gets more powerful when it becomes part of the OS.

Scripting in the BASH shell allows you to run literally every task that can be done, over and over, requiring only as much interaction as you add to it. The possibilities are endless, but we are going to use this article to do something that is generally useful - image resizing and watermarking. Hands down, it's one of the most annoying and mundane tasks around, particularly when you have hundreds of images to go through. Using a script turns an hours-long task into a couple minutes of automated processor cranking, saving you tonnes of time when you're doing your next mod update!